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Sci-fi mini reviews

This week: Red Planet Blues, Wool, Adam Robots, The Curve of the Earth

Red Planet Blues

Wool

Adam Robots

The Curve of the Earth

Fri., June 7, 2013

Red Planet Blues

By Robert J. Sawyer

Viking, 384 pages, $30.00

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There’s always been an exuberance to Robert J. Sawyer’s writing, and reading Red Planet Blues one can’t miss the feeling that he’s having a lot of fun. A semi-parodic space noir that uses his novella Identity Theft as a springboard, it takes us further into the adventures of wise-cracking gumshoe Alex Lomax on the mean streets of New Klondike, a Martian frontier town.

Since Alex is a vintage film buff you can expect a lot of in-jokes and genre tips of the hat to go along with a story featuring whiplash plot twists, lethal babes, superhuman “transfers” who have had their minds uploaded to robotic bodies, greedy prospectors, and even a writer-in-residence who doubles as a femme fatale. Partly inspired by a stay at Berton House, a writer’s retreat in the heart of Klondike Gold Rush territory, Red Planet Blues delivers a pulp buffet of strange things done ’neath the Martian sun.

Wool

By Hugh Howey

Simon & Schuster, 509 pages, $17.00

Starting life as a short story self-published on Amazon’s Kindle platform, Hugh Howey’s Wool took off to become an ebook megaseller, and has since been translated into over 20 languages. Now firmly in the mainstream, this book collects the first five parts of the Wool saga (constituting a self-contained story, though Howey has since expanded on the Wool world) in an omnibus edition.

The premise here is that at some point in the future everyone lives in a massive multi-story underground silo. Punishment consists of being sent outside to die in the toxic surface environment. But reality is never quite what it seems to be on your computer monitor, and our hero — a spirited mechanic from the lower levels who is unexpectedly promoted to sheriff — soon starts to unravel a plot involving the silo’s sinister IT department (hey, we all know they’re up to no good). Slow-moving, a bit conventional, and filled with clunky writing, Wool still makes for a great beach or subway read thanks to Howey’s rich imagining of the silo environment and solid plotting.

Adam Robots

By Adam Roberts

Gollancz, 389 pages, $22.99

The house of SF has many mansions, and in this new collection British author Adam Roberts visits most of them. “I like the idea of writing at least one thing in all the myriad sub-genres and sub-sub-genres of SF,” he tells us in his Preface, and so we get robot stories, time travel stories, alternate reality stories, space stories, and everything in between. A particular interest is in religious and philosophical allegories and experimental narrative forms.

They’re all very clever pieces, sometimes too clever by half, but what saves them from being mere literary finger exercises is the high quality of Roberts’s writing — good enough to give you a smile every couple of pages — and his ability to spin even the craziest stories off in unanticipated directions.

The Curve of the Earth

By Simon Morden

Orbit, 387 pages, $17.50

Cyberpunk has been with us long enough that we can now safely speak of “classic” cyberpunk, which is what the Metrozone novels of Simon Morden offer up. The Curve of the Earth re-introduces us to post-Armageddon superman Samuil Petrovitch, a harder-than-nails genius cyborg fully linked in to the god-like powers of Web 10.0. As you might imagine, this makes him a really annoying guy, albeit darn near unstoppable when he’s on a mission.

His mission this time is to find out what happened to his daughter Lucy, who has mysteriously disappeared off the grid into the wilds of Alaska. With a little help from his trusty A.I. and the netizens of the communitarian/libertarian Freezone, Samuil, a hapless FBI G-man in tow, is off on the next rocket plane to Reconstruction America. Yes, that’s right, the good ol’ U.S. of A. has (surprise!) turned into a nationalist-fundamentalist nightmare of a security state where even profanity has been outlawed. Fans of Morden’s previous books will expect lots of fast-paced, tech-heavy action, and will find those expectations met.

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